


It's a Pleasure

by willowbilly



Category: Hannibal (TV), Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kidnapping, M/M, Mind Control, Murder Husbands, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, One-Sided Relationship, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 20:00:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7375483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What are you?” Kilgrave wonders aloud, breathless, his nail beds white with pressure where they're clamped around Will's skull, flattening his hair.</p><p>“A former FBI profiler, an unstable special agent. A mental patient, a fisherman. A murderer. A patchwork psyche stitched together. A broken, blood-drenched nobody. One half of a whole.”</p><p>“And an aspiring poet, apparently,” Kilgrave quips, releasing Will's head in order to ever-so-slowly pull Will's glasses from his face, fold them, and slide them into his own pocket. “Well now, I do believe you're worth keeping. At least for the time being. Will, Jessica... come along.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's a Pleasure

Jessica wonders if Kilgrave even enjoys opera, or if he's been dragging her to so many because he still wants to make her a little more “cultured.”

Fuck that. Fuck culture, fuck operas, fuck Italy, fuck everything in general and Kilgrave in particular.

Kilgrave's hand slides up her leg, pushing up along the daringly high side slit cut into the satin skirt of her cocktail dress, idle and testing, as he hasn't ordered her to be on her best behavior this time. She has to choose not to lash out, has to choke down her fear and fury and decide not to lose her shit and what little freedoms she's gleaned along with it, so she ignores him and doesn't take her eyes from the performance, a bunch of artfully arranged people painted white and swathed in flowing cloth moving around in slow motion as they wail in slow, descending sopranos and tenors along with the wavering chorus of strings drifting up from the orchestra on either side of the audience. Long draperies billow in the summer breeze around the tall pillars of the stage, the glimmer of stars in the night sky above just visible beyond the glow of tastefully muted, pastel-tinted stage lights and the little orange flames of lone candles stationed on slender stands about the makeshift performance hall.

At least this concert's outdoors and not in yet another dusty mausoleum of a place. She can handle the smell of dewy fresh-cut grass, river water, and car exhaust. It's almost pleasant. The haunting refrains of the performance, the distant sounds of vehicles and crickets, lets her get outside of her head a little. Takes her farther away.

Kilgrave squeezes her thigh, his nails digging through water-smooth fabric, perhaps irked at her unresponsiveness, and Jessica flicks her eyes away from him and towards the aisle almost reflexively, gaze roving desperately over the crowd for a distraction.

There's a man sitting in an aisle seat across from her, a few rows down. Her eye catches on his head of wavy hair, the way it's beginning to loosen from its neatly-trimmed, brushed-back coif into more distinct, coarser curls behind his ears and at the nape of his neck. He shouldn't have foregone the hair product if he'd really wanted to keep it in line.

As if sensing her attention she notices his shoulders tense, spine straightening. His head tilts very slightly, first as if listening to something behind him, and then levels out and swivels just a few degrees so that he can glance out of the very corner of his eye at her. She studies the barest corner of his mouth, the angle of his stubbled jaw, the upward curve to his nose which is visible around the slope of his cheekbone. She does not meet his gaze, and he does not meet hers. After a moment he looks away again, pulls a pair of glasses from his jacket pocket and slips them casually onto his face, though his back remains taut beneath the tailored lines of his suit.

“Eyes forward, Jessica,” Kilgrave whispers into her ear, and she obeys.

 

~~~

 

At the social mingling thing following the opera, the half-naked actors still in full makeup and costume chatting amiably with people in formal evening wear, Jessica sees the stranger again. He's murmuring something to his taller companion, a man who stoops faintly so that he can hear and then smiles gently after him, eyes crinkling, as he departs. The man keeps his head down, glasses still firmly on his face as he weaves through the crowd while radiating a distinct aura of fuck-off which keeps him from being roped into any of the groups involved in conversation around him as he makes a beeline for one of the tables on the perimeter laden with refreshments.

Kilgrave elbows her to get her attention as he passes a glass of red wine her way, motioning for the server guy to get lost as he takes a gulp of his own drink and pins her with a suspicious look over the rim before asking, “What's got you so distracted, darling?”

“Some guy,” her tongue trips out, as vague as she can be under the circumstances.

Kilgrave's eyes sharpen with jealousy. “Another man? Why would you be staring at another man when he can't possibly be more handsome than I am?”

Jessica rolls one foot on its stiletto heel, brings her glass up to shield her lips. “There's something about him that makes me want to look away, so I don't. Other than that I don't know what it is.”

Kilgrave raises one eyebrow, the dangerous flare of jealousy transmuting into a curiosity which is no less perilous. “I'm intrigued. Tell you what, you go seek him out and entertain him until I join you. Keep him around, yes? Use your manners.”

“All right,” she says, and walks towards the edge of the crowd, the back of her neck prickling the entire time. She tries to be inconspicuous as she downs the wine in a few deep swallows on her way there.

He's bent over a little plate of hors d'oeuvres and doesn't look her way until she's almost upon him, and even then he again does not meet her eyes, the path of his sight sliding and assessing, searching out exits at her approach. He takes a step back as she apparently encroaches on his considerable bubble of personal space, and with a pained expression he mutters, “Sorry, can I help you?” His English is perfect, his accent generically American.

Her breath catches, a split second where it registers that she is not talking to Kilgrave, where she realizes she's not compelled to answer. But to hover in silence would probably just drive him away. She still has to say something after all. “No,” she says, smiling, a charming smile to go along with a charming wave of her hand, a charming, slightly bashful shake of her head. The heavy earrings dangling from her lobes tap against the sides of her neck. Charming. “No, I just saw you from across the room and figured you'd be good company.”

“You'd be mistaken,” he says, and he's looking at her face now, his brow furrowed. “This isn't really my... scene.”

“Tell me about it,” she snorts, and then Kilgrave's orders that she use her manners, to put on a convincing show, nudges her to add, “Sorry, I just meant that this isn't mine, either.” She sets the empty wineglass onto the table, making sure to brush up against him as she does so.

He turns his body slightly away from her, discomfort in his posture, but... no, it's more incisive than discomfort. It's unease. “Who are you?” he asks.

“Jessica,” she says, and holds out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”

He warily regards her outstretched hand for a few long seconds before he takes it. He doesn't kiss the back of her hand as she'd been expecting but shakes it, instead, and she feels an absurd, pitiful little spark of gratitude at that. “Call me Will.” He drops his grip like she's burned him after a couple brisk, perfunctory pumps, and shoves his hand into his trouser pocket like he's afraid she'll make another grab for it if he leaves it dangling. “Jessica. You...” He shuffles his feet, glancing over his shoulder and then back at the floor between them. His eyes dart up, and this time they do meet hers, over the slim tortoiseshell rims of his glasses, and she feels suddenly pierced, an icy stab of discovery pinning her in place, making her forget to breathe. “Why are you so terrified?”

Sweat breaks out over her skin and her heartbeat is suddenly rabbit-fast in her chest, like his words have summoned the emotion when really the fear has just been brought rushing to the surface. For a moment she thinks she's going to puke or something, all over her stupid, precarious high heels, but instead she feels her mouth smiling again, a blood-red lipstick curve, and then she's laughing lightly, as though he's told a joke.

She can't let anyone know. He told her not to let anyone know.

Will is staring at her, his expression increasingly drawn, disturbed. “This is wrong,” he whispers, to himself, though his eyes do not leave Jessica's face. “There's something wrong.”

And she can only laugh a little more, because her instinct when others push too far into her business is to suggest that they to go fuck themselves and she can't think of a lie to tell but she has to _use her manners_ which means no swearing but she can't let him figure it out but she _can't think of a lie._

So she laughs, and then there's a hand sliding up over her shoulder, a wiry body pressing into her side, an arrival which in a less shitty world would fill her with relief rather than a renewed surge of resigned dread, and she stops, and breathes, slowly, in and out through her nose because panic attacks fucking suck when you can't give any indication of them, but still she smiles, she still smiles, on and on, and Kilgrave says, “Well, Jessie? Introduce us.”

“Kilgrave,” she says, “this is Will. Will, meet Kilgrave.”

“Just 'Kilgrave,' Jessica?” Kilgrave says, teases, really, grinning at her dotingly, his hand rubbing up and down her bare arm with a rasp of skin against skin, and she thinks that he really believes the fantasy he's spun for himself, really believes that this is something natural, some sort of bliss.

“Forgive me, let's do that again. Will, this is _my lover._ Kilgrave.”

Will's hand stays firmly in his pocket, and the side of his mouth pulls upward, wry. “Kill. Grave. Huh.” He sets his plate of food down onto the table and adjusts his glasses, his fingers straying to comb rather fretfully through his hair. “Not the most subtle of conceits.”

Jessica glances sharply towards Kilgrave, expecting to see his face twisted in anger, for there to be imminent violence. But he looks... _delighted._ “Whyever would you say that?” he inquires, rocking forward onto his toes, nothing but glee in his tone. A shiver races down Jessica's spine and she edges away. Kilgrave doesn't seem to notice, lets his arm fall from around her without protest.

Will looks at him, a flash of eyes, angry at his own perplexity as he answers without consciously deciding to. “You're why she's terrified. Why she's barely a person, pushed down so deeply inside herself that there's something else walking around in her skin, and that something else is a false construction, a _thing,_ which _you_ put there. I've met my share of monsters. I recognize yet another when I see it.”

“What do you see, looking at me?” Kilgrave presses, and of course he's fascinated that anyone else is able to see him as he is, whether or not he agrees. Of course he's so eager to hear all about himself, for good or ill. Kilgrave is his own favorite subject.

“What do you think?” Will asks, and Jessica flinches, Kilgrave goes stiff in shock, because this is a stutter in the script, nobody should be able to deflect one of Kilgrave's questions... but then Will rubs at his temple, shakes his head, and goes on. “You're special.”

Kilgrave lets loose a bark of abrasive laughter, turns to address Jessica with an amused aside. “Oh, I like that. 'Special.' Very true.”

“But you aren't unique,” says Will, and Kilgrave turns back to him, his smile indulgent. “Not so rarefied as you believe yourself to be. It is only the means which are distinct, which are mutated beyond all acceptable concepts of power, but the ends are those of a spoiled child, the petty cruelties and hedonistic hopes of a warped mind with no grasp of basic morality. I speak and all my dreams come true, but that makes everything hollow. Worthless. The best I can do is play pretend, fool myself into believing that I am gifting things with value even as I debase all that I touch. I tell myself that the two of us are in love, and I am wrong. This is all wrong. But it does not matter. Nothing does, outside of myself.” Will blinks, his eyes unfocused and calm. “This is my design.”

Kilgrave's lip curls, something like shock written over his face, and, with uncharacteristic caution, he reaches up and snaps his fingers right beneath Will's nose.

Will's eyes clear suddenly and he slaps away Kilgrave's hand as he would a pesky fly before angling his head down to put the frames of his glasses between himself and Kilgrave's searching gaze.

Not to be deterred, Kilgrave clamps his hands around Will's shoulders, then braces them around the sides of his head, wrenching him upward. _“Look at me,”_ he hisses, and both Will and Jessica do so. There's a manic, avaricious concentration to Kilgrave's regard, now, a light in his eyes as he pushes his face closer to Will's, their noses almost touching, his lips spreading farther and farther back from more and more teeth into a ghastly smile. “What are you?” he wonders aloud, breathless, his nail beds white with pressure where they're clamped around Will's skull, flattening his curly hair.

“A former FBI profiler, an unstable special agent. A mental patient, a fisherman. A murderer. A patchwork psyche stitched together. A broken, blood-drenched nobody. One half of a whole.”

“And an aspiring poet, apparently,” Kilgrave quips, releasing Will's head in order to ever-so-slowly pull Will's glasses from his face, fold them, and slide them into his own pocket. “Well now, I do believe you're worth keeping. At least for the time being. Will, Jessica... come along.”

 

~~~

 

Back at the beautiful villa Kilgrave has usurped he asks Will what he would do if someone were to kiss him. “I only ask, of course, because I can't imagine no one hasn't tried before now, and yet you seem so remarkably tense. You could use the relaxation.”

“I would find out if biting someone's lips off would be as easy as ripping off an ear with my teeth. I don't have a set of dentures like the Dragon's but that hardly matters with soft tissues.” Will has a guileless way of presenting this glimpse of horror, a particular way with understatement which Jessica envies― she's long past the point where she was still capable of discomfiting Kilgrave― but his expression is already too flat, emotionless, even though Kilgrave has not yet given him any orders to that effect. It took much longer for Jessica to descend to that level of passivity, and the fact that he already has squirms in her stomach like a ball of maggots, plucks chords of primal anxiety in the back of her mind. “Tooth enamel is the strongest part of the skeleton.”

Kilgrave actually winces at this, clucking in disappointment. “You're rather a pretty little thing but your personality could use some work. Just like my Jessie, here. I suppose you'll fit right in.”

He makes Will kneel on the floor of the master bedroom, tells him to stay there all night. Jessica watches him as Kilgrave putters about in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, showering. Watches the ceiling when Kilgrave comes back in and fucks her, makes her moan. The next morning, when Kilgrave wakes her up by murmuring into her ear, Will is still there, drooping in place in his rumpled tuxedo, the bow tie loosened and his collar unbuttoned and delicate lavender shadows smudged beneath his eyes.

He's preternaturally still, his hands resting limp and open on his thighs, head bowed and angled to one side to show his neck, a puppet with cut strings. His expression is still empty.

Kilgrave kicks him, just a little, as he tells him to get up and out of the way. He ends up sitting beside Jessica on the bed, swaying on numb legs as he lowers himself down.

Jessica knows better than to get attached. Even if Kilgrave doesn't have Will stab himself, jump out a window, hang himself, even if Kilgrave _doesn't_ order him to his death as he has so many others who have offended him or who simply no longer serve as adequate entertainment, there's a good chance that Will might take her place in Kilgrave's good graces. And that won't leave her free and clear; her luck's always been too shitty for that. It'll leave her as a thing to be discarded with a couple casual words.

She really does know better.

She still inches her hand across the comforter and puts it over his in silent reassurance.

Because at the end of the day altruistic idiocy, the dregs of a childlike dream cooked up with a best friend back when the future was still a bright thing filled with promise, isn't something Kilgrave can make vanish. Not completely. Even though it would make this, make everything, so much fucking easier.

 

~~~

 

“So. What _is_ your power, precisely?”

Will blinks twice, glancing straight upwards in between, a slick flash of bloodshot sclera beneath slivers of dull blue iris. Not quite an eye-roll but pretty damn close.

Kilgrave is fortunately too absorbed in forking up a bite of some sort of very fancy cheesecake made by the lady of the house to notice Will's borderline insolence. The counter is littered with plates and platters of dessert dishes, failed attempts, all of them gorgeous and gourmet, most imperfect, some already rotting, flies buzzing around and tracking sweet fruit sauces across smooth ceramic. The woman wasn't even a mediocre cook before Kilgrave had her practice until her fingerprints were burned off and she finally succumbed to exhaustion by falling asleep in a dead faint. Now she's a master.

“I don't have any power.”

“You have _something,”_ Kilgrave asserts, chewing obnoxiously and pointing his fork at Will's face.

Will twitches his eyebrows and shrugs one shoulder, very slightly.

Kilgrave narrows his eyes, giving him a shrewd once-over as he shovels up another forkful of cheesecake. There's a fleck caught in the corner of his mouth when he speaks again, his thin, lopsided lips moving in exaggerated contortions. “What's your _talent,_ then? That thing that you do. We've both seen it. Haven't we, Jessica?”

“We have.”

Will bites his lips as if he has any chance of stopping himself, but of course he answers anyway, sitting stiffly on the stool at the kitchen island, his spine straight but his shoulders hunched inwards. Jessica can feel an echoing tension in her own posture, the permanent knots of stress her muscles are locked in. The areas spanning either side of her neck are solid slabs of unforgiving tightness, her backbone creaking with every miniscule movement like the vertebrae are strung together, bead-like, on too short a wire.

“I have an empathy disorder. I can... tell what people think and feel. _Feel_ what they feel.”

Kilgrave thunks his elbows onto the granite counter and leans forward. “Fascinating. And it works on anyone?”

“Within my own limitations, yes.”

“What sort of limitations?”

Will shifts in place. Jessica can see him clenching his hands together, his knuckles turning pale. “I can be misdirected. Tricked. Especially if there isn't enough emotion to divine a motive. I can become lost in others' minds. Confused. I can... lose myself.”

Kilgrave cocks his head, pushing his lips out into a thoughtful moue. “Can you _become_ other people, mentally? Could you become _me?”_

“If you put enough time and effort into it. Knew what drugs to use and had a degree in psychiatry. Then yeah. Maybe.” Will turns away, something clearly occurring to him, and as it does so he's forced to verbalize that, too. “Even when there's nothing left of me you'd still have to dig out bits of _him,_ but he's probably too deep a part of me by now. A lost cause.”

_“Him?”_

“Hannibal Lecter. My former psychiatrist. He got very far into my head, and now you could say he's there to stay.”

“Hm.” Kilgrave taps his willowy fingers in a rapid, disorganized tattoo, a minor flurry of motion. “Why don't you work with the FBI anymore? Unless you do.”

“Hard to work for the law when you're on the run from it.”

Kilgrave laughs at that. “No one to miss you, I suppose,” he says, and Jessica sees Will's hands twitch in his lap but Kilgrave didn't frame it as a question.

Jessica looks away sharply, down at the black granite counter tops flecked with gold, the polished surface just reflective enough that she can see a dim, pale image of herself trapped within its depths, and she stifles a spike of desperate hope.

Because there _is_ someone out there, missing Will. And maybe they're looking for him.

 

~~~

 

Will fits right in. He's quiet and well-spoken, his ironic irascibility kept too subtle for Kilgrave to pick up on, and he adeptly trots out his brain tricks anytime Kilgrave points someone out and orders him to put on a show.

“How about that fat woman over there? What's she feeling?”

“Her feet ache. She's been wandering, lost in thought. Bad breakup. Her ex gave her the bruises hidden under her blouse and she's worried that when they fade she'll have nothing else left of him. She'd rather have put up with the abuse than die alone but it's too late now. So she thinks might as well die.”

“What a riot! Go on, then. Do another.”

Kilgrave natters on about possible uses of the ability, listing out ideas. Jessica finds the fact that Will can pick out any undercover cop out of a crowd in seconds flat underwhelming, given that Kilgrave can just as easily avoid attention by ordering it off, but as long as Kilgrave is still interested Will is going to be kept alive and relatively well. Kilgrave's a magpie who's found something shiny, and the shine has not yet worn off.

He subjects Will to the same general rules as he does Jessica, though he never has to order Will to hold his tongue and refrain from cussing him out, as he has her. They're basic things like secrecy, courtesy. No attacking Kilgrave and trying to gouge his eyes out of his godforsaken head. No escaping. Remember to smile.

Will's face looks unused smiling, and his eyes stay dead in a way that Jessica knows hers do not even when Kilgrave tells him to fake happiness as best he can, so after a time Kilgrave lets Will wear his expression as he so chooses, distracts himself from the disappointment by draping Will in a new wardrobe, tightly tailored trousers and v-necks, gives him bracelets and a choker necklace which remind Jessica of manacles and a collar. The second night Kilgrave has Will shave his face bare, and has him sleep in the king bed with him and Jessica. He's taken to ruffling Will's curls, grabbing the back of his neck to get his attention, and Jessica finds a small, disgusting part of herself to be relieved that Kilgrave's affections are redirected towards his new pet. Away from her.

It is with shameful hope and a feverish, crushing dread that she wonders how long it will take Kilgrave for his curiosity to get the better of him, for Will to be woken in the middle of the night by a dry hand pressed gently over his mouth as a madman fumbles at his clothes and lovingly murmurs for him to enjoy it.

 

~~~

 

It's been a week when they're all sitting at the plaza, situated in an open-air café beneath the shade of an awning, headily aromatic flowers hanging heavy against the wrought-iron fence beside them, blossoms of red, purple, and yellow. The petals look velvet-soft. Jessica does not reach out to touch them.

“We've been waiting here for half a fucking hour,” Kilgrave announces peevishly, pushing his sunglasses up his nose with an impatient scowl and rising from the round glass-topped table. “I'm going to go ask after our orders. Stay here.”

Jessica watches as he leaves and doesn't relax once he's made it inside, acutely aware of the fact that whatever unfortunate souls he confronts have no idea of the doom they'll be facing.

She wonders if Kilgrave will make someone pour boiling oil over themselves again, as he had the last time service had been slow to deliver him a meal. At least this time she won't have to be there. Listening to the screams. Smelling it.

The ice cubes in her water glass shift as they melt, clinking together and drawing her eye, first to the table and then to Will, who is sitting straight up, almost at attention, and is staring off in the opposite direction from where Kilgrave has gone.

There's a pinched look about his eyes, a focus verging on panic though he is absolutely still. And also a hint of... warmth. Relief, maybe.

Recognition.

She follows his gaze to a rather tall, lean man with slicked-back hair. His three-piece suit rivals Kilgrave's more flamboyant purple numbers, with peaked lapels, a creamy plaid pattern, a dark waistcoat, and a very stupid, very expensive-looking scarlet silk tie. There's an air of collectedness about him, a regal carriage and a firm step, his shoulders square, and he's watching them with a disturbingly singular concentration. Watching Will. He's facing directly into the sun as he approaches them, but he's the first person Jessica's ever seen who fails to scrunch up his face and squint his eyes against such brightness.

He's the man, she suddenly remembers, with whom Will had attended the opera.

When he reaches them he halts, tilts his head to the side in cool, measured consideration, and smiles, very slightly. Will makes an abortive motion towards him, his expression crumbling into frank longing, and the man's head tilts again, dipping to the other side, his brow furrowing and lips pursing ever-so-faintly.

“May I sit?” he asks, in English flavored with some sort of Nordic accent, and he slides into Kilgrave's vacated chair without waiting for an answer.

“Rude,” Will snorts, and the man's lips curve again, his eyes crinkling, but Jessica's blood is running cold at every calculated micro-expression, every nerve screaming at her that this is a predator from which she should be running, but of course she's fucking rooted to her chair, _staying put_ like a good little girl, a mindless little slave, _fuck._

“Who are you?” she growls, clenching the edge of the table, feeling the metal frame buckling under her fingers.

“Who he is doesn't matter,” Will says, his face closing back into flat unreadability, “because he has to leave. Now.”

The man blinks thoughtfully, folding his hands and setting them before him on the table. The very picture of calm and reason. “I believe I am owed an explanation, Will.”

“I'm not your kept boy. I don't have to come groveling back to you with my excuses all laid out,” Will says, and Jessica is amazed at how soft and steady his tone is, thinks, from the way that Will's erstwhile companion stiffens almost imperceptibly in offense, that perhaps this was enough to drive the man away.

But his offense just morphs into a restrained performance of chagrin. “I apologize if you feel I have been... stifling you, Will,” he says, all honest, unblinking eye contact. Snakelike. “But you must admit that this departure of yours is unlike you.”

“I'm fine,” Will says gruffly, jaw tightening.

“Will,” the man says, fondly and gently chiding, “you forget that we know each other too well for there to be any possibility of lies between us.”

Jessica finds herself snarling at that, the sentiment too similar to Kilgrave's. It cuts far too close to the quick. “He _can't say why,_ asshole,” she hisses, an unfamiliar protectiveness unfurling within her, making her want to mantle nonexistent wings and hide Will from sight.

The man gazes at her, his eyes dark and impenetrable. She can't see the gears working behind them, but can sense them turning, tell from the exactness in every single fucking thing he does. A clockwork creature. “Is this true, Will?” he asks, without looking away from Jessica.

Will laughs, actually _laughs,_ a dry, breathy rattle of bitterness. “You know I'd tell you if I could. There's no other way.”

“So fuck off,” Jessica says. “Before you get stuck in this fucking nightmare, too.”

“Hannibal,” Will whispers urgently, with a stark fear― not for himself, but for the other man― thrumming in his voice, his eyes trained on something behind them. “You have to leave. Now.”

Jessica glances in the same direction and sees Kilgrave wending his way towards them, looking down at the screen of his smartphone.

“Ah,” Hannibal says, like he understands anything of the situation they're in. Like he has any inkling of the base, living horror which is personified in the piece of shit approaching them.

Fucking psychiatrists.

 _“Leave,”_ Will repeats, and, after an interminable moment of suspense, Hannibal turning back to Will with eyes glittering with some unnamed promise, he nods his acquiescence, rises gracefully, and walks away.

 

~~~

 

“What's got you so distracted lately?” Kilgrave asks Jessica, with an idle suspicion, a petulant boredom which has him noticing more than he usually does, irritable and observant. Looking for an excuse.

“Will,” she answers.

Kilgrave frowns over at Will, who sits just out of earshot on the recliner, his head resting listlessly back against the cushions as he stares out the window, that vacancy back in his features, chilling them. “Well? What about our dear Will?”

“He misses someone.”

Kilgrave snorts to himself, and then shouts, “Will? Who is it you're pining after?”

Will doesn't so much as blink, but his lips move as he responds, too quietly to be heard across the distance of the living room.

“Come over here and repeat that, you're too far away.” Kilgrave flaps a hand at him, waving him over, and Will stirs sluggishly, levering himself to his feet with all the reluctance of a corpse made ambulatory against its wishes.

“I miss Hannibal,” he says as he nears, staring with dull-eyed resolution at the floor as he comes to a stop a circumspect length away. Out of arm's reach.

“Your _psychiatrist?”_ Kilgrave exclaims, and Will nods. “What, were you fucking him or something?”

Will's neck cracks audibly, his head jerking to the side before dropping again in another nod, his tendons standing out beneath his flexing jaw.

“Oh, for the love of Christ.” Kilgrave rolls his eyes and gives Jessica a long-suffering look, and his arm tightens possessively about her shoulders. “At least he got to get it on a bit with his, eh? Not like how you were mooning over that Trisha bitch of yours. Pathetic.” He pats the floor beside his feet. “No worries, Will. Sit down.” He smiles, and cards his fingers too harshly through Will's hair the moment he's close enough, forcing his head back to rest against Kilgrave's leg, baring his throat. “Spend some time with me and you'll soon forget all about it.”

 

~~~

 

In the morning Jessica wakes to early dawn light streaming in through the huge bedroom windows, and the weight of a foreign body crouched with its feet on the bed, its shifting barely noticeable through the memory foam mattress.

She rolls to the other side and sees Hannibal Lecter, in his shirtsleeves, holding Kilgrave face-down not three feet away, duct tape against Kilgrave's mouth and more being liberally wrapped about his wrists as he puts up a furious struggle. Hannibal simply leans his knees harder into the small of Kilgrave's back and dislocates a shoulder with a muffled, meaty pop. Kilgrave screams as best he can against the gag, nostrils flaring for air as he writhes like a pinned bug.

Hannibal spares a moment to tip his head at her, that same disconcerting, Mona Lisa-inspired smirk fixed on his face, his eyes bright as a hunting cat's. Downright goddamn perky. “Good morning. Jessica Jones, was it?”

“I never told you my name,” she whispers, staring. It's not like she can run. She can't leave without fucking Kilgrave and his fucking no-escape-attempts policy.

At least she'll get to watch him die before the new psychopath in the room gets around to gutting _her._

“Hannibal,” Will says, and she realizes that he's just been sitting there, on the other side of the bed, propped comfortably against the headboard with his arms folded over his stomach, remarkably unconcerned. Maybe a little grouchy, but all told he's more genuinely emotional than Jessica has ever seen him, actual expression creasing his face. “I've told you not to stalk my friends, haven't I? I could've sworn we had that conversation.”

“I was gathering intelligence, Will. How else was I to be sure that she was not a co-conspirator, helping to hold you against you will?”

Jessica, of all outlandish things to latch on to, catches that Hannibal has just ended two consecutive sentences with “will” and has to stifle a hysterical snort of laughter against her fist. Both of their eyes flick towards her and then back to each other, dismissing her aborted outburst, alarmingly similar in their modes of threat assessment.

Two halves of a whole; reunited.

She edges into a sitting position, inching away as she does so, but freezes as Will's eyes flick over to her again, a faintly troubled look passing over his brow like a wispy cloud over the sun, briefly and ephemerally darkening it. “Now you know better,” he says. “We're not going to hurt her.”

“Of course,” Hannibal agrees magnanimously, and then jerks at Kilgrave's dislocated arm, jostling him into releasing a low moan of pain. “But what of the man who has wronged you?”

“Name's 'Kilgrave,' or so I'm told,” Will says, dry as desert sand, and then shifts a little further into seriousness. “I don't care what happens to him so long as the gag stays on.”

“Oh?” Hannibal asks, politely bemused, as Kilgrave tries futilely to buck him off.

“If you'd gone for his wrists first,” Jessica grits out, her voice sounding rough and uneven to her own ears but feeling oddly detached from herself, as though she's speaking without conscious thought, “you'd be dead or dying right now.”

Hannibal appears dubious, raising one eyebrow as he surveys Kilgrave and seemingly finds him wanting.

“It's his ability,” Will says, wearily rubbing one eye with an index finger. “I've never encountered anything like it, but then, I've managed to steer clear of anyone freakier than myself for awhile. Just. Whatever you do, don't let him talk.”

Hannibal shrugs, a graceful roll of muscle accompanied by a rustle of high-quality cotton against clean skin. His sleeves are folded neatly up above his elbows, his forearms tan and corded and his hands strong-boned and steady. Jessica averts her gaze when she spies a single drop of blood staining the back of his right hand. “Simple enough. I incapacitated the bodyguard so we may take as much time with this one as we wish to.”

Jessica's heart stutters to a convulsive stop, and beneath Hannibal, Kilgrave has begun making a strangled chuffing that she realizes, with an icy tsunami-surge of horror, to be laughter.

“There were three of them,” she says.

“Oh dear,” says Hannibal, appallingly mild. He shoots an apologetic glance Will's way as he dismounts with improbable dignity from the bed and strides towards the door... like a man on a mission, yes, but not in any harried hurry about it.

Will does not look anything close to mollified.

He opens his mouth to berate Hannibal right as Hannibal pivots off to the wall on one side of the door as it swings violently open in the opposite direction, the knob slamming hard enough into the drywall to embed itself with a crack and a puff of dust. The first man through immediately has to contend with Hannibal lunging and grabbing him into a choke hold, using him as a human shield against the second, who redirects his gun from his companion's chest just enough for the bullet to skim past Hannibal's head and shatter the window into a thousand glittering shards which rain down like sharp-edged teardrops. Jessica can feel them pattering into her hair as she scrambles to her feet, and behind her Kilgrave lashes out against Will enough to throw himself over the other side of the bed and onto the floor with a heavy thud which would be comedic in other circumstances.

The second bodyguard is distracted by his charge's fall for a split-second, and Will takes advantage, lunging for him before he can bring his gun arm around, snapping the man's elbow and digging his nails into the tendon of his wrist holding the gun until his hand opens and the firearm drops neatly into Will's grasp.

The man in Hannibal's hold thrashes, his face turning red with lack of air as he brings the heel of his boot down hard on Hannibal's instep. Hannibal was wearing only socks; the better to have snuck in on silent feet with the dawn and catch Kilgrave unawares. He stiffens, the animal part of him startling away from the pain, seeking preservation, and the guard takes the opportunity afforded and butts the back of his head into Hannibal's face. Hannibal's nose yields with a soft cartilaginous crunch at the impact, blood gushing down from his nostrils in a sudden torrent.

There is a gunshot from Will's direction. Blood spatters Jessica's side as she rushes forward and body-checks both Hannibal and guard number one, throwing all three of them into the wall, glass slicing into her feet as she runs, bright blooms prickling at the edge of her awareness. She can't harm Kilgrave in any way but he's never given her any orders against hurting the _fuck_ out of anyone else, and she's got a lot of pent-up rage to express.

Hannibal, unfortunately, takes the brunt of it, his body mostly shielding the man from making any more brutally intimate an acquaintance with the wall, but he still holds onto the guy with a death grip, keeping him squarely in place for Jessica's coup de grâce: a single punch. It takes the man in the sternum, a rippling shock spreading up her arm as ribs shatter inwards, puncturing lungs, maybe heart, who the fuck knows; she never studied anatomy. She pulls the blow just enough to be reasonably sure that she's not going to kill Hannibal, too, though she's not sure why. It's probably not smart to leave yet another psycho free to run around terrorizing the innocent fucking masses, but it's a snap decision, without conscious thought; just _action._ You don't kill off the only allies you have.

 _“Everyone stop,”_ Kilgrave shrieks, and suddenly there is stillness and silence but for the panting breath of the living. The air saws painfully in and out of her throat, a panicky, difficult rhythm out of tune with the frantically speeding beat of her heart. “Everyone stay where you are.”

She slowly swivels around to look as Hannibal lets the dying man slide down to the floor and does the same.

Kilgrave is enraged, standing with silver straps of duct tape still stuck to his wrists and a reddened, slightly less stubbled patch of skin framing his mouth, though his bonds have clearly been severed down the middle with the knife in the remaining guard's hand. The guard's breathing is labored, whistling with the gory bullet hole which sits high on his chest like a vermilion blossom, his eyes flickering, the hand which is aiming the reclaimed gun at Will beginning to droop as the puddle of blood around his feet expands, soaking into the carpet in a ragged-edged crawl.

“What the fuck were you thinking, trying something like that?” Kilgrave demands, derisively incredulous.

Will, on his back on the floor, gets himself to his elbows and shrugs rather awkwardly without trying to fully sit up.

Hannibal makes a humming sound. “I did not, in fact, fully think through my plan to liberate Will. In my eagerness to reunite with him I must admit that I behaved somewhat rashly.”

“No shit,” Will comments, sotto voce, and Kilgrave's head snaps down to glare at him, a sneer on his lips and fury in every tense line of his body.

“I just wanted to get the fuck away from you,” Jessica whispers, and feels herself begin to shiver with apprehension as Kilgrave glances at her from beneath his brows before settling once more on Hannibal.

The bodyguard sinks to his knees, and then collapses in on himself, head bent over his folded legs like a supplicant before his god, but Kilgrave pays no mind to him as he paces forwards, gingerly picking his way through the star field of broken glass as he passes Jessica by. She shudders as he does so, and inconspicuously watches Kilgrave come to a stop before Hannibal, his hands balled into fists. Hannibal is leaning back almost desultorily, shoulders braced against the wall and hips tilted casually forward, most of his weight resting on his uninjured foot and his arms hanging limp at his sides, hands relaxed. He rolls his head back as Kilgrave draws level with him, eyelids lowered and chin raised, the posture automatically contemptuous even if Hannibal himself does not seem anything other than moderately curious as to the proceedings. Blood is still pouring freely from his nose, a sluggish smear of scarlet which he licks slowly and thoughtfully from his lips, as though he is used to the taste. Savoring it.

“Don't try anything,” Kilgrave says absently, studying him as he would a fascinating but potentially nasty creature at the zoo kept safely separated from himself by a sheet of glass. “You're not just a psychiatrist.”

“I'm not,” Hannibal concedes, even though Kilgrave has not asked anything and he does not have to speak. The bastard just seems to like the sound of his own sultry, sanctimonious voice. “You may have heard of me and my exploits from the FBI's Most Wanted, though I believe it was unfair of them to have ranked me anywhere above my dear Will.”

“'Hannibal,'” Kilgrave mutters. “Why is that familiar?”

 _Now_ Hannibal finally looks reluctant to provide an answer. “My best-known tabloid moniker is Hannibal the Cannibal. I consider it rather lurid and tasteless an appellation.”

Kilgrave mouths _appellation_ to himself in disbelief, face twisting. “You're just some kind of fucking serial killer?”

“I prefer to think of myself as an artist.”

Will scoffs softly.

“So you were, what,” Kilgrave says, rounding on him with an expansive, accusingly bewildered fling of his arm, “his accomplice? His serial killing sidekick?”

“Our tabloid couple name is Murder Husbands,” Will says, far too snide and defiant given the present dire situation.

“And Will is no one's sidekick,” Hannibal adds proudly, just as infuriatingly, intentionally oblivious as Will, and so obviously smitten with him that he seems almost an understated sort of parody.

Kilgrave rocks forward onto the balls of his feet and bounces in place a little, clasping his hands behind himself and slowly starting to grin up into Hannibal's face, shaking his head. “You're half right,” he says. “Will isn't anyone's but mine, now.”

Hannibal's expression does not go blank, but his eyes go cold and his smile goes sharper, cruel lips which are slick and shining with blood peeling back to reveal surprisingly crooked teeth.

“Will. Jessica,” Kilgrave says, as he and Hannibal continue to show each other their fangs. “Go sit on the bed and pay attention.”

Jessica's limbs feel wooden as she settles down, Will taking a moment longer to do the same. The lacerations in her feet throb even more intensely once her weight is off them, the wounds only now making themselves known as the adrenaline recedes, and she can see the spots of blood she's tracked over the carpet, the draft of city air gently pushing the smallest particles of glass further into the room, driving them more deeply into the carpet, dust-like. She imagines she can hear the chiming sounds they make as they skitter against each other.

Kilgrave bends and retrieves the first bodyguard's discarded handgun, the one Hannibal had kept from coming into play at all. He fiddles with it a little, clearly unaccustomed to it, but he's familiar enough with the generalities to keep the end which goes bang pointed away from himself as he figures it out. “I mean to make this a lesson to you two.”

Jessica senses Will drawing in breath before he brings himself to talk. “You're only going to kill him because he is your better.” Kilgrave stills, listening. “You're a pale imitation. A shadow. You hoard things of finer quality not out of appreciation but out of greed. You play at sophistication out of vanity, you gain companionship and admiration by demanding it rather than earning it. Your own wants and needs are all you know, your foremost priority, eclipsing those of everyone around you... you're a base, pernicious, and shallow thing.”

Hannibal lifts his chin to watch Will, avid and reverent and smug all at once.

“Really,” Kilgrave asks, facing away so that only Hannibal can see his face, but even from here Jessica can see his shoulders are almost vibrating with tension.

“Yes,” Will affirms tonelessly. “Even at his worst Hannibal was interested in me, _valued_ me, for my mind. For myself. You wanted to keep me around because I was an oddity to own and to mock. Because I said I could think like anyone, and more than anything you crave someone to _accept_ you. Who better than someone who can empathize?” Jessica can just see Will's faint, self-deprecating smile in her peripheral vision. “You thought I could be convinced to love you, the way you'd tricked yourself into believing you'd convince Jessica. You thought it would be easier with me than with her, even if you weren't ready to give up on her just yet. But once again you were blind to anything other than what you wanted.”

“And what was it you think I was blind to?”

“I already knew you. I already understood. I read the entirety of your heart within the first five minutes of meeting you. I dismissed you then, _repudiated_ you, and I haven't learned anything to change my mind since. You are the most pitiable, worthless man I've ever met besides Mason Verger, and believe me, Mason was lower than his own pigs. Lower than the pigs' goddamn shit.”

Kilgrave straightens and presses the gun up against Hannibal's jaw. “Here's what's going to happen,” he says, unnervingly calm. “I'm going to blow your murder boyfriend's brains out while you watch, and then I'm going to have Jessica tear you apart piece. By. Bloody. Piece.” He turns his head towards them just enough for Jessica to see one of his eyes, the whites showing all around the iris which hangs suspended in the center like a mud-darkened moon, his face transfigured into a silent snarl. “Is that clear?”

“How about you just shut up instead?” Will asks, and there is a moment where the impossibility of his response to a yes-no question doesn't register, where it simply doesn't compute, and then Kilgrave is wheeling towards them, Hannibal, the gun, and the glass on the floor all forgotten as he blanches in horrified confusion. He starts to say something, and Will repeats himself, impatient and with every expectation of being obeyed: “Shut up.”

And Kilgrave does, his mouth gaping like that of a landed fish.

“Drop the gun,” Will says, and Kilgrave does.

“Take two steps away from Hannibal and stay there.”

And he does.

“Look away if you want, Jessica,” Will murmurs to her, and she breaks her gaze away from Kilgrave to transfer it wholesale to Will, a huge, unnameable sensation swelling in her chest, making it hard to breathe, making her eyes sting. He stands, moves so that he is directly before her, and takes her hands in his. “Do you want to kill him?”

It's like being asked a question by Kilgrave; the answer comes forth unbidden. “Yes.”

Will waits a long moment, looking down at her, and through the tears in her eyes he takes on a kind of scintillating halo. He picks his next words with utmost precision. With care. “Do you want me to ask you to kill him?”

Jessica whispers her answer, a strangled word of mingled hope and terror, wonder and hatred, a caustic, savage joy. She has to be mindful not to crush his hands within hers as she holds on tight, clutching at him, making him her anchor.

“Do it,” he says, and she releases him. Rises.

She walks over to Kilgrave, heedless of the glass, the wind caressing her face and pushing back her hair. When she puts her hands on Kilgrave it's the first time she's ever touched him of her own volition, but her skin still crawls at the contact. She meets his eyes briefly, accidentally, and then focuses beyond him, letting herself exist only in the present, zeroing in on the task at hand.

She grabs him by the throat, and his heels drag the floor as she walks forward. Only a few steps.

Jessica stops. Looks again into his eyes, purposely this time. And smiles.

She hears him hit the city street below.

 

~~~

 

Will lays down and puts a hand over his eyes. Hannibal palpates his broken nose, failing even to wince as he wrenches it into some semblance of straightness before he calls to Will to give him permission to move. Will has begun to laugh, but still manages to choke something out so that by the time his laughter has turned to screaming, and then to sobbing, Hannibal is at his side, considerately helping to muffle Will's racket by allowing him to bite into Hannibal's arm until he breaks skin. All the while he holds him, smoothing a hand soothingly through his hair as one might to calm a child.

Jessica finally collects herself enough to go wait in the living room. Hannibal emerges not a minute later, as the sirens are beginning to wail down at street level.

“You acted with extraordinary bravery,” he says, every bit the high-society gentleman. “You supported Will in a time of desperate need. For that you have my gratitude, though it cannot repay the debt I owe you.”

“I barely did anything.”

“You did far more than many.” He smiles at her, a hint of the affection he harbors for Will creeping into the creases at the corners of his eyes. “If ever you need a psychiatrist, I will make myself available.”

She snorts. “I am gonna need some fucking therapy after a shitshow like this, aren't I?”

“Far be it from me to aggrandize my profession,” he demurs with false modesty.

“Far fucking be it.”

He cocks his head to the side, towards the windows. “It pains me to depart so abruptly, but it would not do for me and Will to have an encounter with the local authorities. Especially after so stressful an ordeal. Do you have someplace to go?”

She almost shakes her head, but then catches herself. Says, too tentatively, “Yeah, if you could spot me some cash for air fare.”

“Of course,” Hannibal agrees warmly.

 

~~~

 

Jessica doesn't say goodbye to Will, or to Hannibal.

She flies coach over the Atlantic, takes a smelly taxi through New York, walks into Hell's Kitchen on aching feet which feel clunky in their bandages.

Trish embraces her when she arrives limping on her doorstep smelling of the airport and hiding bloodstains under her jacket and worse stains in her head. She holds on so long that Jessica feels as though they're melding together, their hearts beating as one, and she thinks it might be possible to live, again. Just live.

She's finally at home.

 

 

 

 


End file.
